Chapter Text
The man living in the house on 13 Yew Tree Lane was dying. That was the only thing Tony knew about him, but it was enough for his purposes.
He had been checking up on all the houses on this street by the edge of town, and this one had caught his eye. It was the last one on the left, a bit set apart from the others since the lot next to it was empty, all weeds and gravel. Maybe someone had once planned to build a treasured forever home there and then changed their mind. In any case it meant that number 13 was a lonely looking place right by the edge of the woods surrounding the houses lining this short street
It was a tall, narrow, victorian thing with double doors where the once bright green paint had almost peeled all the way off, bay windows on both floors with high, slim panes of glass, a steep roof, and all made of deep red brick. Once it had been a gorgeous place, but now it was run down and trapped in the middle of a yard that hadn't been tended to in ages. Tangles of raspberry bushes, an ancient oak where one of the lower branches had broken off and fallen to the ground, perhaps under the extra weight of winter snows, and had never been cleared away. Half the house was swallowed up by ivy.
At first Tony had thought the place was abandoned, but then he had noticed that all the windows were whole. And when he returned at night, hidden behind trees and bushes where the back yard almost seemlessly blended into the woods, he saw a light burning in the back room.
The man was sitting there, in a worn old wing chair, his head rolled to the side against the high back. Black hair was hanging limp around his pale face and skinny neck. He looked as old and worn as the leather of his chair, dark hollows around his eyes and under his cheekbones, there was something dark on his forehead, and his face more or less a skull under thin, dry-looking skin. The hands on the armrests of the chair looked brittle. He was faintly wrinkled, like an old man, but Tony suspected disease had done that, not years.
He wondered what was eating the guy up at the moment. Some kind of cancer, maybe? AIDS? Could be. He looked like he was being slowly consumed from the inside. Falling apart at the seams.
Tony honestly didn't care. All he knew was that a guy like that would be an easy mark, and he was willing to bet that his medicine cabinet or bedside table would be a veritable treasure trove. People dying slowly tended to have lots of the really great kind of painkillers. Doctors never hesitated to prescribe those if you were hanging on by a thread. What did it matter if you got hooked? Just drown them in morphine and let them die happy.
For his part Tony wasn't that into the stuff. He didn't have the disposition for downers. They did nothing, for the most part. Which was pretty annoying when he could eat sleeping pills like they were candy and still stay wide awake.
Hallucinogens were also useless. His mind just didn't work that way. It refused to shut down and go with it.
No, he preferred stimulants if he could get his hands on them. The chemical, quicksilver high of speed was his favourite. Made his mind hard and sleek and fast like a bullet, turned him impervious and invincible. Yeah, he loved it. And if he could sell whatever he found in Mr. Dying Dude's house for a good price he was searching out his go-to guy who always had the best, cleanest stuff. Tony could feel chills blossom in circles over his scalp at the mere thought of it, could almost smell the sharp, cut-grass scent of the powder.
Yeah, that was a good plan. He was so doing that.
Right now he needed to focus on this plan, though.
The man in number 13 stayed in his wing chair all night. Most of the time his eyes were closed and he looked like he was dozing in his seat, but now and then he picked up a book from a side table and read a few lines or pages, before he put it away again and his head tipped back against the cracked leather. His Adam's apple moved with his strained swallows, standing out clearly on his skinny, sinewy throat. He looked exhausted, as if just picking up the book and deciphering a few lines of text was more than he could handle.
It was into the very early hours of the morning when the man left his seat, heavily supported on first the back of it and then the wall, and the light in the window finally switched off.
And after waiting another half hour, it was time for Tony to move.
He picked up his backpack and slipped it on, pulled the hood of his thick, dark gray sweatshirt lower over his forehead, dragged the black scarf around his neck up over the scruffy goatee around his mouth, settling it across his nose so his dark eyes were the only thing visible of his face. Not that he expected to be seen, but better safe than really fucking sorry.
Sneaking across the back yard was easy, overgrown as it was, and luckily the steps up to the back porch were wrought iron; if they had been wood they would likely have crumbled under his weight. It surprised Tony to find that the door was unlocked when he reached it, but not too much. Neighbourhoods like these were quiet and peaceful and no-one expected to have their house robbed while they slept, safe and sound in their beds. Maybe they'd rethink that after tonight.
The hallway he stepped into was dark, as expected, but there was enough street light falling in through the double doors and the bay window at the front of the house to show Tony a bare, wooden floor. To his right he could make out the black maw in the wall that was the wide doorway to the room where the dying man had been spending his night. Now he couldn't see it, but he remembered what it looked like; bookshelves along the walls, a soot-stained old fireplace and the lonely wing chair. Tony walked past it on the completely silent soles of his sneakers, to find that the rest of the first floor was a kitchen that had an off feel of never being used, and a dusty-smelling dining room behind the dirty bay window.
No bathroom on this floor. Damn. He'd have check out the second floor to find anything of interest.
The steep, narrow stairs ran along the wall opposite the back room. Tony carefully placed a foot on the first step. It creaked, but just faintly. Holding his breath in concentration he continued up to the second floor, eyes on the steps as he tried to find the best place to put his foot next.
When he reached the top he raised his head too look around and found himself staring into a pale, emaciated face, eyes glowing like the reflection of a flashlight in the dilated pupils of a cat in the dark. Unable to hold back a shout of shocked fear, Tony unthinkingly took a reflexive step back, his foot finding only empty air. Arms flailing for something to grab onto and reaching nothing, he tumbled back helplessly.
There should have been pain, he knew that, but there was just nothing. His last semi-conscious thought before everything was snatched away was that he was grateful for that. Tony had never wanted to die painfully.
When he woke back up, there was still no pain. Just stiffness and discomfort. Then Tony tried to shift and move to get more comfortable, and he found that he couldn't. With a frustrated groan he blinked his eyes open and looked around.
He was in a bedroom, on a bed with a dark wooden frame. The window was covered by thick, dark green drapes, but there was a little lamp on the bedside table to his right, with a stained-glass lamp shade in a pretty pink rose pattern that didn't fit Tony's state of mind at all. At least it let him see the dresser and vanity, matching the bed, which were the only other furniture in the room. In the wall on his right side was an door, wide open and showing the dark hallway outside. Tony couldn't see anything out there beyond the circle of light from the bedside lamp.
His hoodie had been stripped off him so he was only in his t-shirt, but still in jeans and shoes at least, and his arms were stretched out to the sides, wrists securely tied to the high, wooden headboard with what looked like a ripped up sheet that had once been white, but was now more yellow. His legs were pulled up closer to his chest and more of the former sheet had been used to tie his lower legs as close as possible to the backs of his thighs, wrapped around the middle of his thighs and shins, and with knots under his knees. Whoever had done it knew their shit, because while he couldn't move so much as an inch in any direction none of the bindings chafed or hurt or cut off the bloodflow.
Tony dropped his head back against the headboard with a thump and considered his options. They were not great. Okay, let's be honest, they were fucking non-existent. All he could do was sit there and wait to find out what the hell was going on. Even though he had a feeling that it couldn't be anything good. A part of him was sure that the best he could hope for was that he was tied up here until the cops could come by and fetch him. At worst... no, he really preferred not to think about the worst that could happen.
”Awake, I see.”
Head whipping around to face the dry, raspy voice Tony felt his heart spasm and start beating frantically behind his ribs, tied down muscles flooding with adrenaline.
The dying man was standing in the doorway. A stained shirt, as yellowing as the ripped up sheet, was draping off his wide shoulders to fall in folds around his wasted away form. Black slacks, fabric so worn it was shiny in places, were hanging off his hips. The leather belt slipped through the hoops looked half like it was helping to hold them up, half like the weight of it would make them fall faster any moment. His posture was hunched, his black hair pushed behind his shoulders so it wouldn't fall into his face, and his arms were hanging by his sides, ending in long, limp and skeletal hands.
The pale, sunken face looked even worse now that Tony could see it in the lamplight, from up close. The dark patches around his eyes looked like purplish bruises, matching the shadows across his hollow cheeks. On his high forehead was an unhealthy-looking gash, drying, grayish flesh glimpsing through the broken skin. Like his body hadn't even tried to heal the wound. Like something you'd see on a corpse.
At once Tony knew the guy was worse off than he'd ever guessed. This had to be the late stages of something truly horrible. Oh, fuck... What if it was contagious? Why hadn't he thought of that possibility before sneaking into the house?
He tried to press himself harder against the wood behind his back, as if he could meld with it if he tried hard enough. Anything to get away from the man now stepping into the room, coming closer on bare, bony feet.
Tony at once wished he'd broken his neck falling down the stairs. That had to be the better option.
Then that thought made him frown a little, despite everything. If he'd fallen down the stairs he should still be in pain; even if nothing was broken he should be bruised and sore as hell. Something was off. Really off. And not only because he was tied to a bed in a seriously sick guy's house. And that was saying something...
While he had been lost in confused, panicked thought the guy in question had reached the side of the bed. He crouched down there, long, skinny legs folding under him as he picked something off the floor. Tony's backpack, he realized quickly. Those spindly hands reached into the bag and pulled something out. He blinked and recognized the cut open bike inner tube he used to tie off. Tony watched helplessly as the man stood back up, supported a knee on the edge of the bed and slipped the rubber band around Tony's upper arm. This close he could even smell the guy, all dust and dry leather and something sickly sweet under the surface.
”What the fuck are you doing?” He'd meant to bark it out, angry, but it turned to a torn whisper on the way from his lungs to his lips.
The man didn't even look up at his face. He just secured the band around Tony's bicep, just tight enough, and then ran a cold, dry thumb over the dark, swelling ridge of the vein in the crook of his tied up, tied off, unprotected arm.
There were no track marks on his arm. Of course there wasn't – Tony was right handed, and the guy had gone for the crook of his right elbow. Well, not that there were any on his left arm either at the moment. He hadn't gotten his hands on anything worth shooting up in months.
”There we are”, the man murmured, before giving a pleased little hum in his throat and turning to reach for something on the bedside table.
It was a syringe. Tony just knew it was one from his own bag, too. Knew the orange colour of the protective cap over the needle.
At once his mind flooded with horrible options – being injected with the man's diseased blood, with some drug tainted enough to fry his vein, something that would kill him slowly and painfully – so many of them that his brain nearly turned blank. He was almost hyperventilating with fear when he saw the man's hand shift its grip and he noticed that the plunger was still at the bottom.
The thing was empty.
Stunned, still terrified but now also thoroughly confused, Tony could just watch as the man twisted the cap off the needle and then moved closer again. His skeletal hands were surprisingly steady as one settled under Tony's elbow, holding him still, and the other slid the needle into place along his arm, unerringly finding the middle of his now plump vein, ready for the taking. The slanted tip slid through his skin with just a tiny sting of pain, gone as soon as it had come, right into his bloodstream.
The man leaned forward then, and caught the end of the rubber band between his teeth. Tony felt strange, cool breath tickle his skin, giving him chills. Then the guy pulled back and let the tie fall off his arm before he once more focused on the needle, smoothly pulling the plunger back and watching the cylinder fill up with dark blood. At the sight he made another noise, this one more like a moan.
It didn't take many seconds to finish. Then he gently pulled the needle back out, watched the bead of blood that followed. His pale, dry-looking tongue came out to lick at his thin, chapped, cracked lips, but he didn't touch it. Just watched it grow until it had to give in to gravity and rolled down Tony's elbow to drop down to the pillow under him. That at last seemed to make the man shake himself out of his staring. He snatched up the rubber band where it had fallen, moved to the foot of the bed and leaned against the wooden board there, just a bit lower than the one Tony was tied to, one leg folded up on the bedspread so he could support his right arm on it, the other leg hanging off the side of the bed.
After placing the blood-filled syringe between his teeth, surprisingly white behind his broken lips, he quickly and expertly tied his arm off, just like he'd done with Tony's, gave the loose skin in the crook of his arm a little slap, before he caressed it. As if saying sorry to himself for the rough treatment. Then he apparently found the vein he'd been looking for, picked the needle form his mouth and eased it through his skin, the tip still beading with Tony's blood. His teeth gripped the band instead, pulled it loose from his arm, and then he slowly, gently, shot the dark red fluid into himself.
Tony had always known there was a weird kind of intimacy to watching someone shoot up. The needle breaking the skin, the act of releasing chemicals to spread through your bloodstream, the way you turned helpless as the high flooded your brain. It wasn't something he'd ever liked to do in the company of strangers, and he'd never let anyone else inject him with anything. At least not outside of a hospital.
So it was with a strange, morbid sense of dark fascination he watched the man inject himself with Tony's blood. Watched as his thin eyelids fluttered low over his dark green eyes, his mouth fell open, his head dropped back and his entire body slumped at the foot of the bed in a kind of euphoric ecstasy Tony was eerily familiar with. But how the guy could feel something like that just from his blood was more than he could understand. He was completely clean at the moment, he hadn't even had anything to drink for a couple of days, so there was nothing that on second-hand use could give the guy so much as a tingle, if such a thing was even possible in the first place. Much less give this kind of high.
The man eased the needle back out once the cylinder was empty. His eyes were still closed as he rested, soaring on the high, and a faint but blissed-out smile curled the corners of his mouth. Then he blinked his eyes open and looked straight at Tony for the first time since he'd entered the room.
For a while they just stared at each other. What the guy saw Tony really had no idea, perhaps his confused horror. What Tony saw was the shadows on the guy's face lightening noticeably, the gash marring his pale forehead starting to close up until there was nothing under his hairline but smooth skin. All of him looked a little bit healthier suddenly, less dry and hollowed out.
Tony pulled his tied legs closer to his chest, as if that could protect him. ”What are you?”
Smiling a hint wider the man propped himself up straighter against the footboard. ”I do believe you already know the answer, kid.” His voice was a lot smoother now, almost oily, slippery, but unexpectedly warm. Almost weirdly fond.
And yeah, he did, didn't he? Fuck.
”I thought you were supposed to drink it”, he said, his mouth as always running when it shouldn't. ”And a lot more of it, too.”
The man huffed, amused. ”Since I found these things in your bag”, he gestured to the needle and rubber band now lying in his lap, ”I'm sure I don't have to explain to you the difference between ingesting and injecting.” He tilted his head a little. ”Do I?”
'Course he didn't. Tony had started out by snorting speed, just like pretty much anyone else in the world who had ever gotten into it, most likely. He still took it that way if it wasn't nice enough to put in his arm – that was only for the good stuff. And sure, the most of the high when you snorted it came from the drug being absorbed into the blood throught the thin, sensitive membranes in your nose. But then? Then the stuff would always drip down the back or your throat, taste like shit and burn its way down to your stomach. People didn't think of it that way, but in the end snorting a drug was basically the same as eating it. You just took the roundabout route through the nasal cavity instead of the mouth.
It was okay, but it had absolutely nothing on shooting a solution of the stuff into your vein.
So was he surprised that this was apparently the same? No, not really.
He shook his head.
”Thought not.”
Tony swallowed. ”And what happens now? You're gonna let me go?” His eyes flickered from the guy's smiling face to the dark doorway and then back. ”You got what you wanted, and you know I won't run to tell anyone about any of this, right? So just... untie me, and I'll be gone. Okay?”
For a while the man just looked at him, still smiling, still a bit amused. Then he put the things in his lap aside and crawled closer along the bed, until he was right by Tony, now grinning down into his face. His teeth really were white, and way too sharp. He still smelled as dusty and stale as the house, but now there was something spicy and musky there too, that had replaced the rotted, cloyingly sweet scent from before.
”Do you have any idea how long I have waited for someone to deliver themselves into my hands, my boy?” There was both heat and sharpness in his tone. ”Someone who won't be missed. Who fits my tastes.”
Tony couldn't speak, just blink up at the pale face, at the moss-green eyes, so much brighter now.
”Far too long”, the man continued. ”Far too long to give up this opportunity.” His grin faded to a little smirk, one shifting between amusement and what might have been a hint of pity. ”But you knew that before you asked me to let you go.”
Not a question, and Tony wasn't expected to answer. Instead a hand that was still bony and frail but less dry and wrinkled, came up to press cold fingertips to his forehead, right between his eyebrows. He thought he saw a flash of green, and then he descended into nothing all over again.
Tony was still on the same bed when he woke up, but this time he was no longer tied up. He was curled up in the middle of the mattress, the pillow under his head smelling of damp and mould, and he was cold because he had no covers and was still just in jeans and t-shirt. But he wasn't tied up, there was enough light falling in around the drapes to show that there was daylight outside, and the door to the room was still open.
He was free to just walk right out.
No, couldn't be that simple. The man had told him he wouldn't waste this opportunity, that he wouldn't let Tony go, so there had to be a catch. A fucking huge one.
Still, if he didn't at least try to escape he would regret it.
His hoodie was on the floor by his backpack, and the rubber band was even put right back where it belonged. The used needle was nowhere to be seen, though. Not that Tony wanted it back. This wasn't the kind of experience he needed a souvenir to remember. So he pulled on the hoodie, zipped the bag shut, and threw it over a shoulder and left the room. Stealthily, but as quickly as possible.
As he went he saw that there were three bedrooms on the second floor, including the one he'd been in. All were simply furnished, the master bedroom a bit more decorated, and all of it was dusty and worn and obviously not cleaned or cared for, at all. It was also all empty, no-one else in sight.
Tony hurried downstairs and quickly glanced into the back room on his way to the door where he had let himself in last night. There was no-one sitting in the wing chair. He heard no sound of anyone coming down the stairs behind him, or sneaking up on him from the kitchen or dining room. It was just him and the unlocked door. And if it wasn't unlocked he could see the lock even from here, ready to be snapped open.
Grinning, relief flooding his system, Tony reached out to grab the door handle and push it down and... couldn't. It was like there was an invisible force field around the metal, stopping his hand a couple of inches away and making it veer off its chosen path. It felt like trying to push the matching ends of magnets together – the connection refused to be made. He tried again. And again. But his hand couldn't come closer to the handle. Or any other part of the door, actually.
The relief he'd felt was quickly turning to confused horror. What the fuck was going on here?!
Breathing harder, he pulled his right arm back and punched the door, with as much force as he could, aiming for the squares of coloured glass in the middle of it. But his knuckes just hit solid air, and bounced back. It didn't even hurt.
”Fuck... That's not right!” He stared at his hand for a moment, then at the door, before he spun on his heel and hurried into the back room, heading for the window that had let him observe the man last night. ”Just let me out, just let me out, just let -” His hand reached for the handle on the side of window and the same kind of force stopped it in its track.
”Shit!”
Frantic, panicking, he turned, casting around for something he could use to break out. His eyes fell on the book on the side table by the chair. Tony snatched it up, swung around and threw it right at the window.
It just bounced uselessly off the strangely dense air and dropped to the floor with a thud and a sad flutter of pages.
”Fuck this!” Growling, Tony pulled the backpack on properly, zipped his hoodie closed, pulled the hood down as far as it would go and the scarf around his neck all the way up to his forehead, covering his eyes. The cloth was thin enough that he still saw the lighter square of daylight and could aim for it as he backed up a few paces, until his back hit a shelf, and then ran for it. Throwing himself right at the window with his arms folded over his head.
He ended up sprawled on his back on the floor, one shoulder a bit sore from the impact, as well as his ass from the rough landing on the floorboards.
A less stubborn person might have given up there, but Tony wasn't less stubborn. And come on, two points of exit behaving the same way could still be a coincidence, right? He needed more for it to be a pattern.
All the windows and doors in the entire house acting the same was a pattern, though. Even Tony had to admit that. The only door that would open was the one to the space under the staircase. In there he found a trap door in the floor, which also happily opened to him. It led to some kind of pitch black crawl space under the house, not even deep enough to be a real cellar. The smells of damp earth and decay wafting up from there made Tony decide not to even try going down there. It gave him a serious case of the creeps.
Then, in another fit of desperation, he tried to attack a wall in an attempt to break out, and exactly the same force stopped his hands.
”No wonder he untied you”, he muttered to himself. ”You're fucking trapped anyway.”
Tony sighed, resigned, and went to lean forward, letting his head slump against the wall – and felt his forehead thump right against the wallpaper. Frowning, he leaned back again, staring at the wall he hadn't been able to touch a moment ago, and then reached out a hand, placing his palm flat on the wall. There was no force field stopping him now.
He gasped in a breath, turned, and ran to the front door, reached for the handle, chest burning with renewed hope. Perhaps whatever-the-fuck-that-was had suddenly stopped working? But then his fingers just slipped on air again, holding him away from the handle.
”You've got to be kidding me...” Running his fingers through his hair he stared at the door. Then back at the wall he had touched before. And then frowned again, putting the pieces together. ”Intent”, he muttered. ”I didn't touch the wall to try to get out that time, so it didn't care.”
Still frowning, Tony turned back to the door, took a step closer, and then raised a single fingertip, aiming to place it right on the solid wood in the middle of the lower part of the door, where the touch could never help him get the door open.
”Not trying to get out”, he told the empty entrance hall at large, more to focus on the thought than anything else. ”Just wanna see if this works...”
His fingertip reached the wood of the door unhindered, and settled there as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening here what so ever.
For a few hours he tried to convince the doors and windows of the house that he had no intention of leaving, at all. He just wanted to hold the door handle. Just wanted to put his hand on the glass. No biggie. Not trying to get out. Nope. Not even a little. Come on... Just let me touch the handle for a sec. What's the worst that could happen?
It never worked. Whatever force was keeping him in the house couldn't be fooled.
By the time he was ready to finally give up and face the fact that he was a prisoner and could never get out, he also realized that he was hungry. With a sigh he made his way to the kitchen, once more noting that the place looked unused. There was a faint cover of dust on everything, so Tony's hopes weren't high when he went to open the fridge – which was so old it was pretty much an antique. As expected, it was empty. So were all the cupboards, drawers and the little pantry he found hidden in a corner. Well, empty of food, at least. There were some old plates and glasses, and some tarnished silver utensils, but nothing edible.
Turning on the water in the sink produced a few strangled coughs from the pipes, and then a rusty flow that slowly turned clear enought that Tony dared to drink it. So at least there was water, but no food.
He walked into the dining room and threw his backpack on the table, sat down and pulled it close, zipped it open and fished out one of four protein bars he had in there from his last visit to the store. It was a bit flattened since he'd landed on his back trying to leap out the window, but there was nothing wrong with it, hadn't been tampered with either as far as he could tell, so he opened the plastic wrapper and ate the thing. In small bites, chewing each one for as long as he could stand it, trying to convince his stomach that it was getting more food than there actually was. Maybe he'd have to make these bars last even longer than he'd thought when he'd stolen them.
After the bar was gone he stuffed the wrapper back in the bag, mostly in the habit of not leaving a trace, and returned to the bedroom where he'd woken up twice now. He pulled the bedspread free, curled up under it hugging his backpack, and slowly fell asleep again.